Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Dictys.
The gallery
Danaë and Perseus on Seriphos
Henry Fuseli, c. 1785–1790
Oil on canvas (101.3 × 127 cm) by the Swiss-British Romantic painter Henry Fuseli, now in the Yale University Art Gallery (inv. 1958.65). It illustrates the moment the wooden chest holding Danaë and the infant Perseus is washed ashore on the island of Seriphos — the episode in which the fisherman Dictys recovers them from the sea and takes them into his care, as told by Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 2.4.1). Fuseli renders the windswept shoreline with a chariot driving across the storm-tossed waves in the background, dramatizing the divine deliverance that ends Acrisius's attempt to drown his daughter and grandson. It is one of the very few post-antique paintings devoted to the Seriphos rescue rather than the more popular shower-of-gold scene, making it the key image of the saga to which Dictys, Perseus's foster-father, belongs.
Danaë Arriving at Seriphos with the Infant Perseus (fresco, House of the Greek Epigrams)
Unknown, 1st century AD
Roman wall painting from the west wall of the exedra in the House of the Greek Epigrams (Casa degli Epigrammi Greci, V.1.18) at Pompeii, executed before the city's destruction in AD 79 and later detached for the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. It shows Danaë cradling the baby Perseus at the instant their drifting chest reaches the shore of Seriphos — the arrival that the fisherman Dictys answers when he pulls the castaways from the sea and shelters them, raising Perseus as his own. As the earliest surviving narrative image of the landfall episode, the fresco preserves the scene that defines Dictys's role in the myth: the humble rescuer who gives the future Gorgon-slayer his home.